Geographical landscape: further beyond our field of vision

Forever beyond our grasp?*

Does science successfully uncover the deep structure of the natural world? Or are the depths forever beyond our epistemic grasp? Since the decline of logical positivism and logical empiricism, scientific realism has become the consensus view: of course our scientific theories apprehend the deep structure of the world. What else could explain the remarkable success of science? This is the explan...

Living beyond Our Means

As someone who has been advocating “living beyond one’s means” since before the Reagan administration, I welcome Thomas’s endorsement of the idea. If we embrace the maxim that statistics is about variation then we should stand ready to explore how that variation varies with covariates. Assuming, as theory may tempt us to do, that covariates shift only the central tendency of the response, while...

Further improvements of our journal performance figures

When we approached our readers two years ago to comment upon the newly released Impact Factor scores from Thomson Reuters (TR) we were happy to announce that for the first time we had passed the critical 1.0 level (1). This time we are glad to let you know about a further increase of this long-questioned instrument for measuring the quality of scientific journals (Figure 1). After a 33% increas...

Assessing Our Vision for Excellence

Our Color Vision is Limited